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Down With Career Presidential Candidates

So Mike Huckabee announced that he's running for President this week, despite the fact that you know he's not going to win and HE knows he's not going to win. Everyone knows he's not going to win. The Bumpkin voting bloc just doesn't that have much power.

But winning, of course, isn't Mike Huckabee's goal. Huckabee is one of a number of people who have managed to make a career out of staging one long, endless, futile Presidential run. If you have enough money, a few rich benefactors, and a handful of bafflingly stubborn constituents, you can usually cobble together a campaign that is doomed to fail, but deliberately so.

After all, there are benefits to losing a Presidential nomination. For one thing, you don't have to be President. PHEW! But you also get myriad other fringe benefits, like a mandatory run of puff pieces from a news-starved political media (THE NEW MIKE HUCKABEE! NOW HE HATES CATS!), an increase in speaking fees, easy lobbying work, flattery from friends and well-wishers, and a potential short-lived run in daytime TV syndication.

All of that awaits you when you gear up to suck at running for President. You don't even have to RUN, frankly. You only need to think about running—as Donald Trump and Sarah Palin so often claim to be doing, as much as what they do can be called "thinking"—and you will get a cursory amount of fame equity in the process.

This is how running for office becomes a purely capitalistic venture: one that can be lucrative, but ONLY for people who already have more than enough money and power. Watching a billionaire cheesedick like Herman Cain run for President is like watching a man openly count his capital gains in front of you. It adds nothing of value to the election process. It's strictly a case of rich assholes using the election cycle to amplify their brand awareness. You and I can't just up and run for office like this. It's like a hedge fund with a $30 million minimum initial investment.

That's why Ben Carson is running. He'll get the usual round of handjobs for being a wild card in the race, and then someone like Jeb Bush will win the nomination, and Carson will be left with triple the Q rating from when he began the process. He will never again be simply Dr. Ben Carson. He will be "former Presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson," and that will earn him at least $200 extra when he's manning the autograph tables at the Tulsa Livestock & Memorabilia Rodeo two decades from now. Like every other part of our political process, we have found an optimal way to corrupt and exploit running for President in a way that benefits only a select few. Mike Huckabee knows this. Ben Carson surely knows this. And soon, every rich fuckface you've ever met will have an exploratory committee. Running for prez is the new stocking up on gold.